


How To Prepare: A Guide by Arlo Thacker

by AngelWithAStory



Series: Author’s Favourites [19]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Fleshing Out Backstory, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Really Character Death, Spoilers for Episode 29, in which the author is emo over thacker and wants to flesh him out, kinda spoilers for episode 30 as well, the barclay/thacker is for literally no reason but i like it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-12
Updated: 2019-07-12
Packaged: 2020-06-26 17:58:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19773469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelWithAStory/pseuds/AngelWithAStory
Summary: The night before Thacker left, he wrote a note to Madeline Cobb and Barclay.What happened before Thacker left Kepler.SPOILERS FROM EPISODE 29 ONWARDS





	How To Prepare: A Guide by Arlo Thacker

**Author's Note:**

> y'all....  
> The last taz fic I wrote was in _november 2016_ and even then it,,,, was an experiment. I haven't written a fic since december last year but in the meantime, I've written a one-act play so I guess I'm not too rusty.
> 
> Basically, I really like Thacker, I know we won't have terribly long with him since we're careening into the finale as we speak, but there's a lot of potential here for story (read: angst) and I have a good feeling the mcelroy boys are gonna pull it out the bag on this one. 
> 
> also, don't drag me over the barclay/thacker, i have a terrible history of rarepairs and I just think it would be neat

The night before Thacker left, Mama visited his home. 

Of course, back then, she was just Madeline. And Madeline visiting Arlo’s home wasn’t that unusual. Even when most of the time they spent together, it was somewhere within the cosy walls of Amnesty Lodge, it was far from the first time Madeline Cobb stood inside Arlo Thacker’s bivouac. 

( _It was the last, at least until the world ended._ )

Their conversation was easy, if a little awkward; weighed down with a hundred futures that may or may not pass and most of which were not good. Even though Arlo knew Madeline was his best friend, but it still felt strange to hear her say it - but it was a nice strange, different to the strange they were both so deeply entrenched in. When Madeline asked about his password, Arlo _laughed_ and quickly wrote it down, waving away her questions about what it meant. 

( _It was the scientific name of his favourite type of wildflower found in the Monongahela forest. Mama never changed it._ )

The day before Thacker left, he spent it walking. 

No matter how much he reassured Madeline and Barclay that it was just a simple _get-in-get-out_ job, there was still that grain of doubt deep in his gut. He couldn’t guarantee the next time he’d see his forest, and he wanted to savour it. 

There was a small ziplock bag in his backpack that he would keep small cut-offs in. Now, Arlo Thacker wasn’t in the business of messing around with nature and taking what didn’t belong to him, but that day felt like an exception. That day, he took small clippings of leaves and wildflowers and carefully kept them in the ziplock bag. Not too many - never take more than you can give back - but enough for him to remember what it was like to walk through the place he was most familiar with on the whole damn planet. 

( _Those clippings did, in fact, make it to Sylvain; pressed tightly between the pages of his journal. They did not make it back._ )

The morning after Thacker left, he forgot something at Amnesty Lodge. 

More specifically, Barclay realised that Thacker had forgotten something. It was an old sweatshirt that Thacker wore a lot in autumn - but abandoned in the winter - with the Amnesty Lodge name printed across the chest. 

Originally, it had been Barclay’s. But after one hunt that had run from the warm day into the cold night and Thacker had been thrown into the cold river by the Abomination, Barclay had ( _gently_ ) forced it over Thacker’s head to try and stop him shivering. As the clock pushed 4AM, and they trudged back to the Lodge, Thacker had tried to give the sweatshirt back. Barclay could still see Thacker’s small shivers that he tried so desperately tried to hide, and refused to take the sweatshirt back, assuring Arlo that he’d get it just back in the morning. 

The morning came and went, and Barclay never asked about the sweatshirt. Thacker thought over and over again about just leaving it in Barclay’s room or giving it to Madeline to make Barclay take it back, but he liked the soft look on Barclay’s face when he wore it around the Lodge. And he liked how domestic it felt to stay up late with a nightcap in his hand, listening to Barclay tell stories, wrapped in the slightly-too-big sweatshirt. 

( _Barclay didn’t wear the sweatshirt after that, but he did keep it around for a while after Thacker left. Once they started to lose hope, he buried the sweatshirt in the back of his closet._ )

The night before Thacker left, he wrote a letter to Juno Divine. 

It was a pretty short letter, but Thacker took a long time trying to find the right words. It wasn’t his speciality, but this was something he knew he had to do on his own. 

Thacker knew it was probably very reckless to try and articulate why he was leaving, and it felt like he was tempting fate by even _thinking_ this mission might take longer than he expected. He wanted to tell her about the Pine Guard and the Abominations, about Sylvain, about how she could take over for him if she really wanted. 

Thacker tore that letter up before he finished it. 

Instead, Arlo Thacker wrote a letter _about_ Juno Divine. A letter of recommendation to the U.S Forest Service. 

Realistically, Thacker had no idea if Juno would go through with her idle thought of joining the Forest Rangers, but he knew that he wanted to help wherever he could. So he wrote the letter of recommendation and methodically packaged it up, leaving it with the rest of his things, Juno’s name written in capitals along the front.

( _Juno Divine would never end up reading the letter that Thacker left. No one, in fact, would read that letter in the six, long years Arlo Thacker was gone. Mama and Barclay barely even registered it when they gathered up his things._ )

The night before Thacker left, he wrote a note to Madeline Cobb and Barclay. 

( _That note was amongst the things Barclay made sure to save from Mama’s office the night Mt. Kepler fell._ ) 

More specifically, he wrote two words and then drew a small doodle in the bottom right corner. 

_Back soon_

Followed by a small pine tree.

**Author's Note:**

> yo i'm [gothic-cepho](https://gothic-cepho.tumblr.com/) (formally, queen_moggy) on tumblr and GothIntern on twitter if you wanna drag me over barclay/thacker
> 
> i might expand on some of the ideas I cooked up here so idk, wish me luck on that lol


End file.
